|
Welcome to J4 Magazine Articles!
ALL » Business » Management >> View Article
|
|
|
|
J4 Magazine
Articles last news, Information and
articles resources,professionals and contain real world advice,More
articles from J4worldwire
|
|
|
|
 |
|
 |
| Leading with Power and Authority: Energize Others with Deep
Green Leadership |
By:
James K. Hazy, Ed.D., Founder & CEO, Leadership Science, LLC |
|
|
One of the most significant aspects of leadership involves the
stewardship of resources both collective and individual. People
instinctively want to understand how their needs will be met in
the present and in the future. When they are confident their
needs will be cared for, they experience a sense of control and
a feeling of power. Ironically, in the process they must
acknowledge a dependence upon collective action for success.
They internalize the collective agenda as their own—a deep
sense of trust in the organization and its leadership is the
result. Leading by influencing people's belief in the fairness
of resource flows and their trust that they will eventually
benefit, is a powerful aspect of leadership.
Like the deep green of the rainforest canopy, when leadership
provides its members with the resources they need to grow, the
organizational canopy is teaming with life. In this second of a
series of articles exploring the spectrum of leadership
influence, I address the question: how does deep green
leadership energize others?
The Story Part 1: The Conundrum One Thursday afternoon as a
scheduled meeting was breaking up, Lynn, the CEO, realized he
had time to stop by the field office in town. He had hoped he
could as this office was one of the lower performing ones in the
region. He sent his driver ahead with his luggage saying he
would have the office manager drive him to the airport after his
visit.
When he arrived at the plush offices, he was taken by the
emptiness of the space, the quiet and relatively low energy
level. The support staff seemed to be making themselves busy and
the members of the outside sales team who were in the office,
were busily doing paperwork between conversations with office
mates. When questions were posed about how things could be run
more effectively, Lynn was struck by the pervasive sense of
powerlessness. Productive work was hard to identify against the
backdrop of make-work activity.
Lynn regretted having become disconnected from the organization.
He remembered a few months back when he visited a high
performance office. It had seemed as though an "invisible hand"
was guiding action, efficiently and effectively.
He remembered feeling that things were going well then, that
actions seemed directed and everyone was excited and happy. They
came in early and stayed late. The pace of action was quick and
efficient. Now, in contrast, people seemed to be making work,
active but without clear link to the organization's objectives.
They were doing what they thought was right, but weren't sure.
Morale, it seems, had sagged. As he left the office and headed
for the airport, he made a mental note: "Our leadership plan
needs work," he thought.
Analysis and Perspective In his leadership role, Lynn was
appropriately, if informally, monitoring a leading indicator of
performance. When he noted the apparent confusion regarding
efficient resource allocation and a pervasive sense of
powerlessness he was observing an indicator of sagging
leadership effectiveness. He appropriately hypothesized that
this decline was related to a reduced "velocity" of leadership
across the organization, the amount of time spent on leadership
activities was declining. Because a pervasive sense of
powerlessness and confusion about resource distribution are
indicative of a decline in a specific type of leadership
influence, called deep green leadershipSM, he realized that he
needed to initiate programs to reenergize this type of
leadership in the organization.
Lynn knew that three steps were required: first gather
information about the current situation, diagnose the issues and
formulate hypotheses; second, initiate specific leadership
activities designed to shore-up the deeply held sense of
fairness in resource distribution across the firm and the sense
of potency or power that results; and third, institutionalize
change by integrating these initiatives into the organization's
culture.
Lynn realized this would not be easy. His leadership teams must
find ways to influence members' deeply held beliefs about their
relationship with the organization and their sense of the
organization's fairness. The benefits of success are great,
however, because a sense of fairness enables trust and clarity
of action. Both focus action on collective benefits rather than
on individual comforts.
Case Study Examples Many organizations face periods where change
in the environment or to the organization's structure disrupts
the flow of resources through the system. The organization's
members begin to wonder what these changes mean to them and
whether they will be treated fairly. During these periods, the
organization's members do not feel in control of their own
situation and of their organization's success. They spend time
and energy trying to understand what the situation means to them
and attempting to position themselves to benefit or simply to
protect their interests. Sometimes they even consider leaving.
To prepare for possible inequity, some members use the
organization's resources to feather their nests and accumulate
power in order to feel in control. Upon reflection, Lynn
realized that he himself had used his driver to satisfy his
personal needs even as those of the organization were not best
served. When the sense of unfairness or lack of control occurs
broadly across the organization, leadership intervention is
required.
The success of Intel in the microprocessor business is
legendary, but it didn't have to be that way. The Intel story
might have been quite different if some of its managers had not
been skilled at gaining access to firm resources, that is, at
deep green leadership.
>From the moment he joined Intel, technologist Les Kohn believed
the firm should enter the reduced instruction set computing
(RISC) processor market pioneered by competitors Sun
Microsystems and Motorola. However, strategically, Intel had
decided not to enter the market and had not allocated resources
to the product.
Kohn knew he needed to garner firm resources if his dream was to
be realized. He also knew that a skunk works project would not
have sufficient scale and scope to build the team he needed.
Therefore, he decided to "sell" the project to top-management as
a co-processor to be sold along with Intel's core products,
rather than as a stand-alone processor that would have competed
with Intel's core product line.
With the product funded, resources flowed to the project and to
those working on it. Fortunately, market momentum grew and
because the product had good margins, Intel's production rules
ensured adequate fabrication capacity and other resources were
supplied to the product. With his focus on providing the needed
resources to his project and his team, Kohn exhibited deep green
leadership influence. Likewise, Intel prospered in a new market
with growing revenue1.
* * * Michael Dell, founder and CEO of Dell Computer Corporation
is a master of deep green leadership. His organization is famous
for aligning resources with strategy and leads its industry with
power and authority. In his memoirs Dell emphasizes how
important it is for all employees to understand the
organizations value creation strategy and to realize that their
rewards are related to actions that directly support this
strategy. "We explained specifically how everyone could
contribute.... And we make it the core of our incentive
compensation plan for all employees.2" At Dell Computer, power
and authority, not to mention impressive returns over many
years, were the direct result of the deep green leadershipSM
programs that provided clarity and alignment about resource
flows.
These stories demonstrate the power of deep green leadership and
its impact on people, whether in a division or across the firm.
When leadership operates to reinforce people's deeply held sense
fairness with respect to resources and their access to them,
they are empowered. This energizes them, so that everyone
organizes the collective effort, not just a few people at the
top of the pyramid.
The Story Part 2: Resolution When Lynn arrived in his office, he
immediately asked some tough questions. "How well do people
understand their decision authority? and do they understand how
our business works? how resources flow and decisions are made?
Are we passionate that everyone has the tools and resources they
need to do their jobs? Do we critically review project plans and
budgets and make sure everyone controls the resources they need?
Do people feel they share in our collective success? How does
the situation compare with six months ago? How engaged are our
people?
These were difficult questions, but ones that could be answered.
The process took several weeks, but once the data was gathered
and preliminary analysis was completed, the trend was
clear—leadership activity aimed at clarifying the resource
distribution flows in the organization, deep green leadershipSM
activity, had fallen off in the organization.
When he had these answers, Lynn called his leadership team
together to share the findings and express his concerns. "We
seem to have lost our edge," he said. "I don't see the same
level of self-motivation and energy in our people that I did six
months ago. Data showing reduced activity levels in this area
across the firm support my belief that there is cause for
concern. Our leadership velocitySM in the areas of resources,
decision authority and reward distribution has dropped off. To
be the strong company we need to be, we have to do better."
The team had a difficult time at first, uncomfortable that all
members of the organization could ever feel they were being
treated fairly and had what they needed to do their jobs. It
seemed a bit ambitious and perhaps naïve to believe everyone
could be made to think the organization was fair in its resource
distribution. "Life isn't fair", some managers argued.
What began as a one-hour discussion, continued into the evening.
Follow-up meetings were held with a much broader array of
leaders. It became clear from the interaction that even among
the leadership, there was a sense that there was an unevenness
or arbitrariness in decision making, and tellingly, that this
was okay. Renewal was needed. As Lynn knew, it had already begun.
In the course of the discussion, it was agreed that a key
objective over the next six months was to greatly clarify the
decision-making authorities and resource flows across the
organization. Each group agreed to work within their teams to
clarify and document their value creation strategies and the
decision making process at all levels of their organization.
Monthly town meetings were planned with the sole focus on how
the firm did business, what drove success and how each person's
work fit into the process. In parallel, the compensation
programs of the firm were reviewed and communication plans
developed to further everyone's understanding of how resources
were used and distributed in the organization. The process
cascaded into the organization until a consistent and clear
picture of the business began to emerge across the organization.
The quarterly cultural survey in use was modified to include
targeted questions to provide on-going feedback.
After six months, the results of this initiative were documented
in a new section of on the firm's employee website. As
appropriate, aspects were also integrated into the organizations
planning process thus providing much greater clarity and
visibility to into the process. All managers were asked to
communicate the process with their teams and provide feedback.
After several months, the changes to the process dwindled to a
manageable level, and enthusiasm was up. Excitement was evident
and morale was improving.
To close out the cycle of leadership, Lynn asked his teams to
propose ways to be proactive, with continuous feedback and
action. He realized that leadership requires discipline and
vigilance and that nothing works forever. At the same time, he
didn't want to wait for the same problem to surface again.
Epilogue On a recent visit to the same sales office he had
visited earlier, Lynn shared a ride with a sales manager who was
also heading to the airport. He found it was a good opportunity
to learn what a junior manager was thinking and how she thought
about the organization. "You know", she said a bit timidly, "I'm
glad to know you're sharing your ride to the airport. We are
pretty close to hitting out stretch objective this quarter and
we need to save every dime we can. I'm hoping to have a little
extra spending money at Disney World this spring!"
As he pulled his luggage from the trunk with a loud "thump!",
Lynn smiled to himself. He was happy to share his car if it
helped her have a little more fun with her family. She deserved
it. _____________________________________
1Burgelman, R.A. (1991). Intra-organizational ecology of
strategy making and organizational adaptation: Theory and field
research. Organization Science, 2(3), 239-262.
2Dell, Michael with Catherine Fredman. (1999) Direct from Dell:
Strategies that revolutionized an industry. New York; Harper
Business. p.135.
|
|
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
